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Drobo, the device that lets you create a giant hard drive from your SATA drives, has come out with a giant new addition.  Called “Drobo Pro,” it lets you install up to eight hard drives and supports up to 16TB of space.  Like the latest Drobo, the Pro has USB and Firewire 800 connections, but adds in iSCSI.  The company says that iSCSI allows you to use Gigabit Ethernet to access the drive, but it’s not really for networking, “Think of iSCSI as you would a higher performance FireWire.” 

The thing that separates Drobo from the rest of the devices that use RAID, is that Drobo can take advantage of different sized drives.  When you normally do a RAID set up, the smallest drive becomes the standard for the rest.  So if you have a 20GB drive with a 100GB drive, the RAID will be 40GB total (2 20GB drives).  Drobo can combine different drives. 

Also impressive is the continuous back up by the Drobo.  The Pro can withstand failure of up to two hard drives without losing data.  The device costs $1299 (and that’s without any hard drives).  At that price point and feature set, it appears the Drobo Pro is meant for small business for now. 

Product Page: [Drobo Pro]